Aldo Leopold quotes - page 2

He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance. (Aldo Leopold)
The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? View quote
Aldo Leopold
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there. View quote
Aldo Leopold
If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me. View quote
Aldo Leopold
There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why. View quote
Aldo Leopold
What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another. View quote
Aldo Leopold
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think. (Aldo Leopold)
In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels. View quote
Aldo Leopold
All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning. View quote
Aldo Leopold
The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches. View quote
Aldo Leopold
The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution. View quote
Aldo Leopold
A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession. View quote
Aldo Leopold
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master? (Aldo Leopold)
Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit? View quote
Aldo Leopold
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas. View quote
Aldo Leopold
No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members. View quote
Aldo Leopold